1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to Internet end-user systems and, more particularly, relates to technology for improving the efficiency with which such end-users are able to navigate the Internet.
2. Background and Related Art
The recent evolution and promulgation of the Internet has been compared in its significance to human development to the invention of the printing press. However, anyone who has spent even a small amount of time navigating the worldwide web very quickly becomes aware of one of the serious impediments to its use, namely the long delays which may be experienced while waiting for web pages to be downloaded and displayed. These delays may be attributable to a number of factors, including the sheer numbers of new users coming on line, limited bandwidth of Internet servers, and the demands on such bandwidth resulting from the increasingly rich and complex data which is becoming available through the Internet. This data may include text, multimedia including streaming video and audio data, full motion video images, Javascript programs and Java Aplets, all of which exact increasingly greater demands on the already limited bandwidth of the Internet.
One factor which unnecessarily contributes to the performance problem is that the end-user navigating the Internet and the worldwide web in particular frequently does not know what type of data he or she is waiting on, e.g., text, images, Java programs, or the like. For the end-user to ensure that all data is displayed and therefore none is missed, the user typically does not even turn image display features off of a web browser such as the Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator popularized by the Microsoft and Netscape Corporations, respectively. The result of this is that the user frequently and unnecessarily waits on all of the data, much of which may be irrelevant to the particular user's needs at the time.
One approach to addressing this problem, as mentioned, is to permit the end-user to at least deactivate images in the web browser which are notoriously the cause of some of this delay due to the large amount of data associated with high resolution and motion images. If the web “surfer” is only interested in the textual information of a web page, by deactivating the transmission, loading, and display of these visual images, at least the delays associated with such images are eliminated. However, several problems are associated with this approach. First, it is static in the sense that once this text only feature is activated in a browser, image data is turned off indiscriminately for the entire session and with respect to all websites and pages traversed by the user. Moreover, this deactivation of the images does not even begin to account for yet additional root causes for these delays which are becoming so serious as to effectively completely negate the utility of the Internet in many instances. These additional causes may, for example, be data types other than images such as the aforementioned Java code.
For all the foregoing reasons, technology would be highly desirable which could provide a significant performance improvement to the navigation of the Internet and websites, particularly those which are increasingly becoming enriched with associated demands on the limited Internet bandwidth. Still further, such an improvement would be highly desired which was dynamic in nature, taking into account characteristics of different types of websites and even within a particular website, the characteristics of even individual pages or subareas of the website which may have different delay characteristics associated therewith. Still further, such a system was highly sought after which could take into account delays associated not only with visual images but other attributes of websites giving rise to undesirable delays.